Related Activities

6. Related Activities

This section explores a range of touchpoints that provide media consumers with opportunities to engage in structured, show-related activities. Activities, in this context, describe pursuits that require media

consumers to take an active role and participate (as opposed to content and products, which might enable various activities, but are themselves received through a one-way process of consumption). Show-related

activities can take at least four forms: themed activities, experiential activities, productive activities and challenge activities.

6.1. Themed Activities

“Themed activities” refer to those show-related pastimes that, much like the generic branded merchandise described earlier, have no inherent or inextricable relationship to the program. Instead, themed activities have been retrofitted with “show-related material and themes” to make the activity relevant.

When such offerings are a logical fit with the content and basic appeals of a show, themed activities have significant benefits: themed games and activities are often inexpensive to produce, and provide a cost- effective method for generating prolonged interaction between a media consumer and the show’s own brand. The website for NBC’s workplace sitcom The Office includes (among other diversions) an Office-themed version of solitaire, with playing cards depicting the show’s characters and generic office supplies, and a simple fighting game that pits animated bobble-head figurines (of Office character Dwight Schrute and Apprentice star Donald Trump) against each other in a boxing match set on a conference table. For another

show, such themed activities might seem both banal and illogical; in the context of The Office, which derives much of its humor from the awkward, banal and impersonal nature of the modern office environment, these activities provide compelling diversions that convey and reinforce the show’s basic appeal. Such activities, one can assume, are precisely the sort of generic, time-wasting activities that the show’s characters might seek out to avoid doing their own work.

Themed activities can also prove compelling when developed in relation to programs with strong, likable and iconic characters. Few shows have made better use of themed activities than The Simpsons, whose characters have appeared in themed implementations of several common game formats (e.g. bowling,

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On the other hand, when themed activities are developed which fail to enhance (or even correspond with) the specific pleasurable aspects of a program, the results can be perplexing (at best), or in a worst case

scenario, downright insulting to a show’s audience. A simple example of this might consist of a simple jigsaw puzzle which, when assembled, reveals a show-related image or logo: except in the extremely rare case

of television programs focused on jigsaw puzzles, such an offering would do little to improve, deepen or reinforce a viewer’s relationship with the core television program. 44 Instead, such themed activities can

appear transparent and patronizing, designed not for the benefit of the audience, but to serve the interests of sponsoring advertisers, who generally interpret all show-related activities as opportunities to reach potential

consumers with brand messages.

6.2. Experiential Activities

“Experiential activities” are those pastimes that place participants in a specific role, which in turn allows them to experience show-related thrills through their own actions. Unlike the previous touchpoint categories, which allow viewers to engage with television properties primarily through relevant acts of consumption (of content, information or products), experiential activities cast the participant as an active agent with varying degrees of autonomy and control. While almost all experiential activities relate to a show’s narrative and themes, the available examples demonstrate that they can do so in a variety of ways.

The most common implementations of this touchpoint are show-related computer games, board games, role-playing games and online activities. In some cases, activities focus on evoking specific moments and recreating activities from an existing episodes of a program, offering viewer-participants the chance to experience those moments themselves in

what amounts to an interactive, performative adaptation. 45

For programs that already adhere to the structure of games or competitions (e.g., almost all reality television), such activities are generally designed to place the viewer in the role of a contestant. Videogame

44 In chapter five’s in-depth evaluation of the various engagement opportunities surrounding ABC’s Lost, this exact scenario arises. 45 Kurt Lancaster has dedicated an entire book to surveying the various experiential activities and opportunities developed in relation to Babylon 5. (Lancaster, K. Interacting with Babylon 5. 2001.)

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implementations of Wheel of Fortune and Jeopardy were among the first television-based “experiences” offered, and newer games now allows players to compete in shows ranging from American Idol to The Apprentice.

In other cases, experiential opportunities offer new narrative sequences and objectives that are grounded in the familiar themes and recognizable motifs of the series. Within these activities, which most often take the form of videogames, players are generally positioned within one of four possible roles:

(1) As themselves, or original characters of their own design. In the Desperate Housewives videogame, the player assumes the role of a new housewife who has moved onto Wisteria Lane, and is quickly drawn into the drama and intrigue that characterizes the show’s narrative.

(2) As recognizable characters from the program. In the 24 videogame, players are given the chance to perform the central role of Jack Bauer as he moves through a 24-hour sequence of events structured in the same fashion as each season of the show, while in Buffy The Vampire Slayer: Chaos Bleeds (2003), the player alternately assumes the roles of Buffy, Xander, Willow, Spike and Faith, as needed.

(3) As a new token character. In most of the videogames developed around the CSI franchise, the player is cast in the role of a new detective who has been assigned to partner with one of the show’s lead characters. Similarly, the ER videogame positions the player as a new intern in the hospital where the show is set, assigned to more familiar characters.

(4) As an unspecified agent. Many game formats place more emphasis on specific rule structures (e.g., real-time strategy) or experiential opportunities (e.g. simulators) than on narrative exposition. As a result, the player is never assigned a specific identity, since an implied generic role will suffice: providing additional details about the player’s assumed role would not only be irrelevant to their subsequent experience, but would undermine the player’s ability to imagine themselves in the role of the unspecified agent driving the action.

Some experiential activities are less narrative and goal-oriented, and may offer participants the chance to navigate through information within a diegetic framework while performing a role, or simply provide the freedom to roam freely through immersive implementations of recognizable environments and settings from

a television program. In his analysis of Dawson’s Desktop, Caldwell described a feature that invited visitors to “take a 360-degree ‘virtual tour’ of the show’s Potter’s Bed and Breakfast (a real set in the production, but

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technological augmentations, designed to “[enable] viewers to live vicariously in a constructed diegetic world and space outside of the show.” 46

Kurt Lancaster has written an entire chapter detailing and evaluating one such experience developed around Babylon 5, which casts the viewer-user as a visitor to the show’s titular space station, and provides them with a choice of tour guides who will (ostensibly) offer different perspectives while guiding them

through their experience 47 . A similar approach was taken in developing The X-Files: Unrestricted Access, which was little more than a database of detailed information on each case depicted during the television series. Rather than simply providing this information “straight,” however, Unrestricted Access positioned the user as a hacker who had broken into a top-secret government database – a role that lent the experience a conspiratorial aura, similar to the tone that pervaded the television series itself.

With increasing frequency, television creators and producers are also experimenting with the development of experiential activities that also function as narrative extensions. This is not entirely without

precedent: most of the games developed around Buffy the Vampire Slayer, for example, were designed – much like the licensed fiction described in this chapter’s earlier discussion of narrative extensions – as “lost episodes,” depicting events that took place at specific moments in the larger narrative timeline of the series.

However, it is one thing to develop a game that doesn’t contradict an existing narrative, as with the Buffy games, and quite another to produce a game that actively fills in narrative gaps and provides new canonical information that has previously been withheld, as in the recent video game of 24 (2006), which acts as a narrative bridge between the second and third seasons of the television program.

Since May 2006, when the producers of Lost launched a summer-long transmedia campaign called The Lost Experience 48 , a growing number of television programs have also experimented with narrative extensions in the form of alternate reality games (ARGs), elaborate interactive campaigns that require viewers

46 Caldwell. 52. 47 Lancaster. 112-27. 48 The Lost Experience is addressed in more detail in Chapter 4, Section 2

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to work together to solve complicated puzzles, riddles and other challenges in order to uncover information or reconstruct a narrative. 49

In late 2006, NBC’s Heroes launched an ARG entitled The Heroes 360 Experience, which featured regular installments of “original content created specifically for TV, online, and mobile” throughout the

second half of the show’s first season. 50 Content releases were synchronized with episode broadcasts, making the show itself an important resource for understanding and solving the various challenges presented

in the game.

As the campaign’s titular emphasis on “experience” suggests, the Heroes ARG was designed to provide participants with a meaningful, exciting and novel experience, and empower them with a more active role than standard viewing allowed. However, to the frustration of many participants, ARGs often impose challenges in order to access content, yet allow no interaction with the content itself. As such, the experience of participating in a campaign such as The Heroes 360 Experience often falls somewhere between the voyeuristic passivity of traditional media consumption and the game-like experience of active participation.

6.3. Productive Activities

“Productive activities” describe those touchpoints that position viewers, whether as individuals or collaborators, as authors and producers of ‘new’ content. It is important to note that in this context,

productive activities do not extend so far as to encompass Fiske’s notion of semiotic productivity, which asserts that television viewing is always a fundamentally active and productive experience, insofar as viewers

are required to construct meanings and form interpretations of content while watching it. While Fiske is right to assert that this process of meaning-making represents a meaningful and active process of

productivity, it is also something of a semantic conflation: generating interpretations and readings might constitute a process of producing meaning, but meaning itself does not become tangible – and therefore a

49 In research conducted for MIT’s Convergence Culture Consortium (C3), I have written extensively on the history, structure and significance of alternate reality games, both as a form of storytelling and as a mechanism for generating audience engagement. See

Askwith, I, This Is Not (Just) An Advertisement: Understanding Alternate Reality Games (Cambridge, MA: Convergence Culture Consortium, 2006)..

50 NBC-Heroes, Heroes Wiki, 2006, Available: http://www.nbc.com/Heroes/wiki.. NBC-Heroes, Heroes 360 Experience, 2006, Available: http://www.nbc.com/Heroes/360.

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“product” – until it is manifested or expressed in a concrete form (e.g., discussion posts, mash-up videos, etc).

The range of productive touchpoints implemented around current television programs demonstrates that such activities can result in the creation of knowledge, creative and expressive work, and social texts.

Knowledge. At present, one of the most popular new productive touchpoints is the wiki, an online tool that enables entire communities to author and revise massive hypertextual information resources. The recent integration of show-specific wikis into a wide range of official program websites can be interpreted, at some level, as evidence of the television’s industry’s growing awareness that online communities represent sites of ‘collective intelligence.’ Applying the work of French cyber-theorist Pierre Lévy to the behavior of online fan communities, Jenkins recently explained collective intelligence as “the ability of virtual

communities to leverage the combined expertise of their members.” 51 As television networks and advertisers become aware of these ‘knowledge communities’, and recognize the profound satisfaction that viewers can

experience through participation in group endeavors, more television programmers are beginning to offer activities that position their shows as the basis for communal collaboration.

Creative & Expressive Works. Many productive activities provide viewers with opportunities to create, produce, and distribute their own original or remixed content, albeit within well-defined boundaries. As such, the most common examples of expressive extensions are remix and mash-up tools, which provide Internet visitors with access to “raw” content and production assets, including unused video footage, sound effects and music tracks, graphics and so on, and empower them to experiment with creating new meanings and interpretations from existing material.

While “official” expressive extensions arise as part of the current YouTube-powered trend toward encouraging and showcasing user-generated content, dedicated viewers within television fandom have been producing unauthorized expressive work for decades, a practice that has received a great deal of attention

51 Jenkins. 27.

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within fan studies. It is too soon to determine whether the value and significance of producing expressive and creative work will be transformed by official recognition. In the meantime, however, this change is likely

to compel some viewers to experiment with expressive production who lacked the motivation to do so in the past.

Social Texts. Participation in show-based online communities can also be considered an example of productive activity, insofar as participants generate new texts as a byproduct of communicating their ideas to others. These texts may serve a wide range of functions, allowing their creators to express opinions and preferences, share personal interpretations and readings of specific program texts, propose creative alternatives, construct analytical theories, voice unrealized or unfulfilled desires, or, in many cases, serve no productive function at all.

6.4. Challenge Activities

Finally, “challenge activities” are those pastimes that provide viewers with an opportunity to demonstrate their skills, competencies or expert capabilities – often gained through attentive viewing of a television program – as a means of overcoming challenges. Examples of such activities include the all-but- ubiquitous trivia quiz, which allows viewers to demonstrate their competency at recalling show-related

details, and multiplayer competitions such as ABC’s Enhanced TV, which pose a common challenge to large groups of viewers, and reward the winners with recognition or prizes.

In a sense, most videogames based on television properties – described earlier in this section as experiential activities – can also be interpreted as challenge activities, insofar as they provide structural goals

and challenge players to achieve them. It is somewhat ironic to note that television-based videogames are often less likely to emphasize the inherent satisfaction of overcoming challenges than their independent

counterparts, since games linked to television programs often place a greater emphasis on satisfying the viewer’s desire for immersion or expanded access to the world, characters, or narrative of the television series

upon which the games is based.

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